The mysteries surrounding some tenement names

The names chiseled onto city tenement building entrances are often pretty puzzling.

The typical tenement is more than 100 years old. With the original builders long-gone, who can explain where some of these names come from, and why they were chosen?

Like Novelty Court, on Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg. Actually, a little research turned up an explanation: this used to be the site of the Novelty Theater, according to Cinema Treasures, which disappeared from city directories by the 1920s.

A. Segal’s (Secal’s?) Apartments are also in Williamsburg. But who was A. Segal, and why did he put his first initial and last name on his building?

Blennerhasset sounds like Manhasset, a town in Long Island. I’ve never seen the name anywhere else but on this tenement near Columbia University.

Who was Frances, and how would she feel about the terrible shape the building named for her is in, on Lexington Avenue in East Harlem?

Blennerhasset might relate to Harman Blennerhasset, a figure in the Aaron Burr conspiracy, who had a tenuous connection with New York. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harman_Blennerhassett. I expect there are websites and books that tell his story in interesting detail. E.g., search under Blennerasset Island.

I don’t know which Blennerhasset the building is named after, but they were an interesting and important family. They built a home on Blennerhasset Island in the Ohio River, which has recently been restored (i.e., rebuilt) and in which they sheltered traitor Aaron Burr.

Author Elizabeth Enright (also friend of the Glackens family mentioned in your recent “Green Car” post) wrote a story about a woman who was named “Bonnadilla” after a New York apartment building, and then traced the name to an old Western mining town.
–Road to Parnassus